I'm pretty sure that the Polytron can "milk" virtually any animal, producing a protein-rich nutrient fluid... Also available in larger and more powerful sizes...
Humans are faster; but they have much less time...
Apollo 11, for instance, logged only 21 hours 36 minutes on the lunar surface and 2 hours 31 minutes of outside crew time. Total mission length? 8 days, 3 hours.
I, lest I be misunderstood, hardly wish to diminish the engineering feat that getting people safely to the moon, and back, represented. It was enormous.(and given 1960s robotics, there were unlikely to be adequate rovers available). The point is, though, that in terms of exploring the lunar surface, humans just can't be kept there long enough without resources of fairly epic scope, which seem unlikely to be available. Robots, on the other hand, can stick around for months to years(particularly if one is willing to do things like use radiothermal generators rather than solar cells...).
Consider, the Apollo Lunar module was a 14,696 kg craft(not sure if that counts crew mass), the mars rovers (rover+ entry hardware) were packed into 1,063 kg. The specifications for the later lunar module revisions were for up to 70 hours of surface time. The comparatively tiny rovers were rated for ~2,200 hours, and substantially exceeded that. What sort of robots do you think they could manage with Apollo level mass constraints?
"Consumers" are just cattle. Enterprise licensees, though, carry some clout.
This doesn't help much with cheap consumer systems, or all the various no-you-can't-just-build-one-from-newegg-parts tablets and laptops and other consumer gear; but it does largely ensure that "Enterprise" desktops, laptops, and servers will have some sort of keyfill mechanism, quite possibly offered at an additional cost...
I'd honestly be more worried about the combination of pressure from Team DRM(sure, we'd be happy to make our "Inspired by Inspiron" new release film collection available for the right price; but look at all the vagabonds on your trusted keys list...) and the general OEM tendency toward a "least effort" model of firmware development, especially; but not exclusively, in consumer hardware.
There is a long, sordid, history of BIOSes being released that don't even work well enough to keep the spec sheet from being a lie, much less well enough to make using all the features actually safe and stable. Unless some sort of earthshattering magic happens, I'm guessing that UEFI development will go pretty much the same way. Since the product isn't done until Windows runs, Windows will work; but any additional keyfill systems will be a bit of an afterthought, unless specifically marketed as some kind of enterprise feature(in which case they'll be expensive and rather baroque...)
It's unfortunate, actually: The Romans were pioneers in applied politics(building on some Greek developments in theoretical politics and small-scale experiments). The Italians.... Not so much.
In broad, total-budget-allocation numbers, it is unequivocally the case that the US seems to have backed out of a great many 'big picture' projects in favor of a mixture of foreign policy adventuring and financial jiggery-pokery.
In that sense, Armstrong is correct.
However, it must not be forgotten that Armstrong is also speaking in his capacity as one of the White Elephants. The people we sent to the moon pretty much to show Ivan whose dick was bigger. An impressive feat of engineering(that conveniently aligned with the Cold War enthusiasm for big missiles); but not really a high point for science. Those unassuming little RC cars on mars that survived so long did a fair bit more extraterrestrial data gathering, and a combination of orbital and improved ground telescopes have done extraordinary deep-sky work...
So far as Armstrong is arguing that there is something rotten in the US, he is correct. However, I can only take them seriously so long as he stays there, rather than expanding into a lamentation over the decline of the impressive, but scientifically dubious, in favor of unsexy but productive and increasingly robotic space work.The fact that it's easier to find money to save gamblers from the consequences of their own folly than it is to explore the universe is sad. The fact that tinned-monkey 'space exploration' is being supplanted by increasingly sophisticated robotic systems is not.
How long has it been since that was actually dogma outside of intro-level stuff(I ask by way of honest inquiry, in case somebody is familiar with the recent history of the field, not rhetorical attack)?
I am given to understand that it was at one point; but friends-of-friends in the university lab scene tell me that, while still considered to be largely ill-understood, the study of epigenetics and other subtle environment/genome interactions was a very hot area, with lots of exploratory work being done.
I assume that he is either trolling or has some sort of longer-term issue in mind(presumably being linked to the fact that they are just another consumer electronics vendor, so all it would take is a failure of taste on their part to tank them...); because their P/E is only 16.3(definitely higher than some; but the assertion that a P/E of.54 is correct is bold... Even someone like RIM, about which optimism is pretty limited, is at 3.95)...
They change their bundleware push every few weeks to months, it seems to vary a bit. Chrome is a recent addition, some McAffee shit was before that, I think the bing toolbar may have shown up once or twice...
It's atrociously unprofessional on Adobe's part, very 90's.bomb affiliate sleazeware; but it isn't a google-specific thing(though Google is getting themselves rather dirty by association, particularly when they have google.com from which to offer things, which is a pedestal that few can hope to aspire to...
The real problem would be the moderately sub-lethal cases:
According to TFA, the plan is that inertia prevents blood circulation to the brain, starving it of oxygen and inducing death. Unfortunately, there are a lot of increasingly impaired outcomes short of death that depriving the brain of oxygen can give you. Suicide certainly isn't for everyone; but I don't know of anyone who is looking for some serious permanent brain damage...
I'm not sure a high-powered death-coaster is going to qualify as "humane" for anybody who isn't a bit of an adrenaline junky prior to their planned demise.
It lacks some of the sculptural potential; but I have to imagine that there are dozens to hundreds of possibilities taken from the anesthesiologists' "Don't do this or the patient will die." course that are at least as euphoric, quite as lethal, and not so disquieting to the inner ear...
You'd need some voltage-conversion circuitry, and the ringer equivalence number would be stratospheric; but you might be able to get away with powering the modem, or even the entire computer, directly from the POTS line. For a few seconds. Until you tripped a protective mechanism or Ma Bell's telco ninjas came for you...
My suspicion is that, if Comcast thought the 90-day rule wouldn't be relevant, they wouldn't have imposed it...
Given that this is an (approximately) value-rational, profit-seeking entity attempting to fulfill an obligation attached to a merger deal at the lowest cost, it seems only reasonable to suspect that every term and condition of the offer is either obligatory(as in the case of the price) or designed to reduce the number of takers(90-day requirement, no outstanding comcast bills requirement, households qualifying for free school lunches requirement). It could certainly be the case that, for demographic reasons, the 90-day requirement doesn't cut as deeply as it might among a different demographic; but if it didn't exclude some potential takers, there would simply be no point in imposing it...
Yeah me too. Its the warm fuzzy feeling of someone paying $70 a month for the same crappy 1.5Mbps (but advertised as much higher), and knowing that I'm also paying for my lazy ass welfare neighbors net.
Low rent class-warriors are one of the world's more pathetic sights:
Comcast is charging you $70/month for a shit connection and getting away with an almost-certain-to-make-the-already-pitiful-state-of-'competition'-even-worse merger deal by throwing your neighbors a crumb. Are you angry at Comcast because Comcast is farming your sorry ass under the pretense that they operate in a competitive market? Or at the regulators and blowhards of the nation who allow this charade to continue? Of course not...
You are angry at your neighbors because your neighbors are getting a crumb... You manage to think of your neighbor as though you were locked in a zero-sum game with him and be a terrible custodian of your own interests. Impressive. Most Impressive.
The merger consent deal only required them to do this for three years(not 3 years per subscribing household, 3 years, clock starts ticking toward the point where they needn't offer it anymore). It also excludes anyone who has had comcast service in the last 90 days, or owes comcast any money or hardware from past service, or doesn't meet the income criteria...
Even if they are losing money on these accounts(which is by no means a given), the time and population restrictions on the offer should put a pretty tight lid on overall costs.
This program appears to do just that(in addition to fulfilling their NBC merger requirements at what is likely a fairly low cost). Depending on the area, you can't get that particular internet tier, if they offer it unbundled at all, for less than $20/month and sometimes rather more.
In addition to generally high prices and tepid speeds, there is really a pretty gigantic hole toward the bottom of the ISP market: even in densely settled areas with mature infrastructure buildouts, it can be pretty tricky to find anything that doesn't have at least a $15 base price, and often nickel-and-dimes you up toward $30...
A revenue maximizing price-discrimination tactic and a PR coup that should keep those meddlesome regulators from breathing down their duopolist-at-best necks... Plus, the odds are good that at least some of your customers will feel more shafted by the fact that nasty, undeserving, poor people are getting low prices than by the fact that those prices only look low because all the other prices are so high.
It isn't about being dangerous and scary(history suggests that there's always somebody, usually many somebodies, expendable if you care about a project enough...), it's about not engaging in largely pointless white-elephant projects at the expense of actual science and engineering. Because robots are better at space than humans, they tend to allow much more of the mission to be about space, rather than about coddling them until they can land again.
The only thing you'd really need humans in space for is determining what happens to humans in absence of gravity, which you can do in earth orbit, and eventually sending some out to set up shop in a new location set up by the robots for their convenience. Anything other than zero gravity can be (comparatively) cheaply simulated by putting people in assorted test chambers on earth(not that we are, for the most part, bothering to do that, which suggests how serious we are about long-term plans for humans in space) and the space-related work can be done more efficiently by robots.
I'd certainly suggest tracing the audio line starting from the OnStar module end, and working your way out to the mic(s), rather than starting at the mic end and hoping for the best...
That might be why they are aiming at the upcoming iPhone, not the present one...
Apple, so rumor has, has been reducing the Samsung slice of the BOM substantially of late(A4, Samsung, A5, somebody else, I'm not sure what they are doing for flash memory...), out of some mixture of desire to get a better deal and reprisal against a competitor. Once the slice falls below a certain level, it stops making sense to tolerate Apple's legal shenanigans in order to move more components, and starts making sense to take action to protect your ability to move finished products.
I can't speak for "people"; but my hope from such mutually destructive activity is that (at the cost of considerable short-term mayhem) it will make the present arrangement untenably expensive even for the incumbent patentholders. Essentially, the present patent system is hopelessly over-determined(in the sense that pretty much any action is covered by numerous broad, sometimes overlapping, patents held by multiple entities, and the cost of securing licenses for them all exceeds the value of almost any action); but survives because it is rather loosely and selectively enforced. Strengthening it will serve to bring its faults into sharper focus.
Historically, you had the patent trolls sucking blood on the sidelines, and the little guys getting squished; but a more or less cold-war environment between the major players. Some sabre rattling and money moving about; but nothing that really upset the status quo. However, if it gets to the point where entire flagship product launches can be, and sometimes are, scotched by patent complaints to any one of an alphabet soup of assorted regulatory bodies, I suspect that the pressure to change the situation will be considerably greater.
As long as the major players can use patents to their advantage, at the (comparatively minor) cost of paying off a troll now and again, the situation will not change. If the pain moves sufficiently far up the food chain that nobody can ship anything, I'm guessing that the congresscritters of the world will be prodded into action...
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I'm pretty sure that the Polytron can "milk" virtually any animal, producing a protein-rich nutrient fluid... Also available in larger and more powerful sizes...
Humans are faster; but they have much less time...
Apollo 11, for instance, logged only 21 hours 36 minutes on the lunar surface and 2 hours 31 minutes of outside crew time. Total mission length? 8 days, 3 hours.
I, lest I be misunderstood, hardly wish to diminish the engineering feat that getting people safely to the moon, and back, represented. It was enormous.(and given 1960s robotics, there were unlikely to be adequate rovers available). The point is, though, that in terms of exploring the lunar surface, humans just can't be kept there long enough without resources of fairly epic scope, which seem unlikely to be available. Robots, on the other hand, can stick around for months to years(particularly if one is willing to do things like use radiothermal generators rather than solar cells...).
Consider, the Apollo Lunar module was a 14,696 kg craft(not sure if that counts crew mass), the mars rovers (rover+ entry hardware) were packed into 1,063 kg. The specifications for the later lunar module revisions were for up to 70 hours of surface time. The comparatively tiny rovers were rated for ~2,200 hours, and substantially exceeded that. What sort of robots do you think they could manage with Apollo level mass constraints?
"Consumers" are just cattle. Enterprise licensees, though, carry some clout.
This doesn't help much with cheap consumer systems, or all the various no-you-can't-just-build-one-from-newegg-parts tablets and laptops and other consumer gear; but it does largely ensure that "Enterprise" desktops, laptops, and servers will have some sort of keyfill mechanism, quite possibly offered at an additional cost...
I'd honestly be more worried about the combination of pressure from Team DRM(sure, we'd be happy to make our "Inspired by Inspiron" new release film collection available for the right price; but look at all the vagabonds on your trusted keys list...) and the general OEM tendency toward a "least effort" model of firmware development, especially; but not exclusively, in consumer hardware.
There is a long, sordid, history of BIOSes being released that don't even work well enough to keep the spec sheet from being a lie, much less well enough to make using all the features actually safe and stable. Unless some sort of earthshattering magic happens, I'm guessing that UEFI development will go pretty much the same way. Since the product isn't done until Windows runs, Windows will work; but any additional keyfill systems will be a bit of an afterthought, unless specifically marketed as some kind of enterprise feature(in which case they'll be expensive and rather baroque...)
It's unfortunate, actually: The Romans were pioneers in applied politics(building on some Greek developments in theoretical politics and small-scale experiments). The Italians.... Not so much.
In broad, total-budget-allocation numbers, it is unequivocally the case that the US seems to have backed out of a great many 'big picture' projects in favor of a mixture of foreign policy adventuring and financial jiggery-pokery.
In that sense, Armstrong is correct.
However, it must not be forgotten that Armstrong is also speaking in his capacity as one of the White Elephants. The people we sent to the moon pretty much to show Ivan whose dick was bigger. An impressive feat of engineering(that conveniently aligned with the Cold War enthusiasm for big missiles); but not really a high point for science. Those unassuming little RC cars on mars that survived so long did a fair bit more extraterrestrial data gathering, and a combination of orbital and improved ground telescopes have done extraordinary deep-sky work...
So far as Armstrong is arguing that there is something rotten in the US, he is correct. However, I can only take them seriously so long as he stays there, rather than expanding into a lamentation over the decline of the impressive, but scientifically dubious, in favor of unsexy but productive and increasingly robotic space work.The fact that it's easier to find money to save gamblers from the consequences of their own folly than it is to explore the universe is sad. The fact that tinned-monkey 'space exploration' is being supplanted by increasingly sophisticated robotic systems is not.
A mixture of evil and profound incompetence?
How long has it been since that was actually dogma outside of intro-level stuff(I ask by way of honest inquiry, in case somebody is familiar with the recent history of the field, not rhetorical attack)?
I am given to understand that it was at one point; but friends-of-friends in the university lab scene tell me that, while still considered to be largely ill-understood, the study of epigenetics and other subtle environment/genome interactions was a very hot area, with lots of exploratory work being done.
I assume that he is either trolling or has some sort of longer-term issue in mind(presumably being linked to the fact that they are just another consumer electronics vendor, so all it would take is a failure of taste on their part to tank them...); because their P/E is only 16.3(definitely higher than some; but the assertion that a P/E of .54 is correct is bold... Even someone like RIM, about which optimism is pretty limited, is at 3.95)...
They change their bundleware push every few weeks to months, it seems to vary a bit. Chrome is a recent addition, some McAffee shit was before that, I think the bing toolbar may have shown up once or twice...
.bomb affiliate sleazeware; but it isn't a google-specific thing(though Google is getting themselves rather dirty by association, particularly when they have google.com from which to offer things, which is a pedestal that few can hope to aspire to...
It's atrociously unprofessional on Adobe's part, very 90's
The real problem would be the moderately sub-lethal cases:
According to TFA, the plan is that inertia prevents blood circulation to the brain, starving it of oxygen and inducing death. Unfortunately, there are a lot of increasingly impaired outcomes short of death that depriving the brain of oxygen can give you. Suicide certainly isn't for everyone; but I don't know of anyone who is looking for some serious permanent brain damage...
I'm not sure a high-powered death-coaster is going to qualify as "humane" for anybody who isn't a bit of an adrenaline junky prior to their planned demise.
It lacks some of the sculptural potential; but I have to imagine that there are dozens to hundreds of possibilities taken from the anesthesiologists' "Don't do this or the patient will die." course that are at least as euphoric, quite as lethal, and not so disquieting to the inner ear...
You'd need some voltage-conversion circuitry, and the ringer equivalence number would be stratospheric; but you might be able to get away with powering the modem, or even the entire computer, directly from the POTS line. For a few seconds. Until you tripped a protective mechanism or Ma Bell's telco ninjas came for you...
My suspicion is that, if Comcast thought the 90-day rule wouldn't be relevant, they wouldn't have imposed it...
Given that this is an (approximately) value-rational, profit-seeking entity attempting to fulfill an obligation attached to a merger deal at the lowest cost, it seems only reasonable to suspect that every term and condition of the offer is either obligatory(as in the case of the price) or designed to reduce the number of takers(90-day requirement, no outstanding comcast bills requirement, households qualifying for free school lunches requirement). It could certainly be the case that, for demographic reasons, the 90-day requirement doesn't cut as deeply as it might among a different demographic; but if it didn't exclude some potential takers, there would simply be no point in imposing it...
My understanding is that the rule is "Having enough nukes means never having to say you're sorry."
Yeah me too. Its the warm fuzzy feeling of someone paying $70 a month for the same crappy 1.5Mbps (but advertised as much higher), and knowing that I'm also paying for my lazy ass welfare neighbors net.
Low rent class-warriors are one of the world's more pathetic sights:
Comcast is charging you $70/month for a shit connection and getting away with an almost-certain-to-make-the-already-pitiful-state-of-'competition'-even-worse merger deal by throwing your neighbors a crumb. Are you angry at Comcast because Comcast is farming your sorry ass under the pretense that they operate in a competitive market? Or at the regulators and blowhards of the nation who allow this charade to continue? Of course not...
You are angry at your neighbors because your neighbors are getting a crumb... You manage to think of your neighbor as though you were locked in a zero-sum game with him and be a terrible custodian of your own interests. Impressive. Most Impressive.
The merger consent deal only required them to do this for three years(not 3 years per subscribing household, 3 years, clock starts ticking toward the point where they needn't offer it anymore). It also excludes anyone who has had comcast service in the last 90 days, or owes comcast any money or hardware from past service, or doesn't meet the income criteria...
Even if they are losing money on these accounts(which is by no means a given), the time and population restrictions on the offer should put a pretty tight lid on overall costs.
This program appears to do just that(in addition to fulfilling their NBC merger requirements at what is likely a fairly low cost). Depending on the area, you can't get that particular internet tier, if they offer it unbundled at all, for less than $20/month and sometimes rather more.
In addition to generally high prices and tepid speeds, there is really a pretty gigantic hole toward the bottom of the ISP market: even in densely settled areas with mature infrastructure buildouts, it can be pretty tricky to find anything that doesn't have at least a $15 base price, and often nickel-and-dimes you up toward $30...
A revenue maximizing price-discrimination tactic and a PR coup that should keep those meddlesome regulators from breathing down their duopolist-at-best necks... Plus, the odds are good that at least some of your customers will feel more shafted by the fact that nasty, undeserving, poor people are getting low prices than by the fact that those prices only look low because all the other prices are so high.
Comcastic work, boys.
It isn't about being dangerous and scary(history suggests that there's always somebody, usually many somebodies, expendable if you care about a project enough...), it's about not engaging in largely pointless white-elephant projects at the expense of actual science and engineering. Because robots are better at space than humans, they tend to allow much more of the mission to be about space, rather than about coddling them until they can land again.
The only thing you'd really need humans in space for is determining what happens to humans in absence of gravity, which you can do in earth orbit, and eventually sending some out to set up shop in a new location set up by the robots for their convenience. Anything other than zero gravity can be (comparatively) cheaply simulated by putting people in assorted test chambers on earth(not that we are, for the most part, bothering to do that, which suggests how serious we are about long-term plans for humans in space) and the space-related work can be done more efficiently by robots.
Are you also looking forward to doing some flash upgrades, and then another round when the inevitable security issues are eventually patched?
Anonymous Coward, I must request that you cease your class warfare immediately.
Strike all instances of "larger corporations" and replace them with "job creators" immediately.
Thank you for your cooperation.
I'd certainly suggest tracing the audio line starting from the OnStar module end, and working your way out to the mic(s), rather than starting at the mic end and hoping for the best...
That might be why they are aiming at the upcoming iPhone, not the present one...
Apple, so rumor has, has been reducing the Samsung slice of the BOM substantially of late(A4, Samsung, A5, somebody else, I'm not sure what they are doing for flash memory...), out of some mixture of desire to get a better deal and reprisal against a competitor. Once the slice falls below a certain level, it stops making sense to tolerate Apple's legal shenanigans in order to move more components, and starts making sense to take action to protect your ability to move finished products.
I can't speak for "people"; but my hope from such mutually destructive activity is that (at the cost of considerable short-term mayhem) it will make the present arrangement untenably expensive even for the incumbent patentholders. Essentially, the present patent system is hopelessly over-determined(in the sense that pretty much any action is covered by numerous broad, sometimes overlapping, patents held by multiple entities, and the cost of securing licenses for them all exceeds the value of almost any action); but survives because it is rather loosely and selectively enforced. Strengthening it will serve to bring its faults into sharper focus.
Historically, you had the patent trolls sucking blood on the sidelines, and the little guys getting squished; but a more or less cold-war environment between the major players. Some sabre rattling and money moving about; but nothing that really upset the status quo. However, if it gets to the point where entire flagship product launches can be, and sometimes are, scotched by patent complaints to any one of an alphabet soup of assorted regulatory bodies, I suspect that the pressure to change the situation will be considerably greater.
As long as the major players can use patents to their advantage, at the (comparatively minor) cost of paying off a troll now and again, the situation will not change. If the pain moves sufficiently far up the food chain that nobody can ship anything, I'm guessing that the congresscritters of the world will be prodded into action...